Big Social Tell Gov They’re Working on Anti-Terror Counter Propaganda

Facebook, Google and Twitter told Congress Wednesday that they’ve gone beyond screening and removing extremist content and are creating more anti-terror propaganda to pre-empt violent messages at the source.

Representatives from the three companies told the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation that they are, among other things, targeting people likely to be swayed by extremist messages and pushing content aimed at countering that message. Several senators criticized their past efforts as not going far enough.

“We believe that a key part of combating extremism is preventing recruitment by disrupting the underlying ideologies that drive people to commit acts of violence. That’s why we support a variety of counterspeech efforts,” said Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy management, according to an advance copy of her testimony obtained by CNBC.

Bickert said that in addition to using image matching and language analysis to identify terror content before it’s posted, the company is ramping up what it calls “counterspeech.”

Facebook is also working with universities, nongovernmental organizations and community groups around the world “to empower positive and moderate voices,” Bickert said.

Paul Gordon is the publisher and editor of iState.TV. He has published and edited newspapers, poetry magazines and online weekly magazines.
He is the director of Social Cognito, an SEO/Web Marketing Company. You can reach Paul at pg@istate.tv

It’s the worst of the worst catastrophes, and surely the only people that would be interested in buying something (in this case, guns) from someone else without the government knowing about must SURELY be criminals. […]